HOW DO
I MAKE MY OWN TEXTURES
By José Pablo Luna Sánchez. 2006.
Before you make your own
textures, you need to understand what UV mapping is.
Once you know that, the only thing we need to know is how to understand the
UV display you have in UV mapper.
In the tutorial we used cylindrical projection.
As you may noticed, we used
a texture to wrap a shape as if it was a cylinder.
It is not a linear projection, but a projection that is done AROUND an
axis (such axis is the centerline of the cylinder).
If we take this into account,
we may realize about how we made the texture for the main body of the rocket.
This is how the main body of the rocket looks.
And this is the texture we used.
The texture template appears in UV mapper inside the red square I drawed so you can see what is the texture area.
As you may notice, when
comparing the texture and the UV mapper template, the top side of the texture
corresponds to the exhaust of the rocket, which is oriented in the +X axis.
The bottom of the texture is the nose of the rocket, which is oriented towards
the -X axis.
As you will notice, the projection axis for this rocket is the X axis, for the
texture will wrap a cylinder with a centerline along X axis.
So if you are going to make
a texture, select the proper projection you need in UV mapper and crop a screenshot
of UV mapper using the red square I drawed on it.
This will be your texture template in your favorite image processing software.
To take a screenshot of
the current window, use CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+PRINTSCREEN.
Your texture template would look like this once we crop the screenshot in our
image processing software...
As we draw on that template, using our favorite image processing software, it looks like this.
And it looks like this in the final rocket.
Notice that we used UV mapper
display to MAKE a NEW texture from the UV mapper template.
Since it doesn't display
the texture, we are not allowed to see if the area for our template fits a certain
area of a texture we have.
So it is not good for texturing if you have already an existing texture.
Take this into account when you make your own mesh.